Gone Home - And Thank Goodness

As Congress closed its doors for the year, veteran Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., didn't pretend to be approaching the holidays in a jolly mood. "The president has won," he said grimly.

Indeed, the very same Bill Clinton who began 1999 in danger of being convicted in the Senate on House impeachment charges managed to get most of the legislation he wanted from a surly Congress still itching to punish him.

Other Republicans professed to see the political glass half full rather than half empty, and insisted that the GOP-controlled Congress had achieved many of its own goals. House Speaker Dennis Hastert marched to a news conference with his troops behind a tootling bagpiper to dramatize the party's claim to having rescued Social Security funds in the Scots' legendary tight-fisted way.

Rushing off on vacation, members of Congress left behind a mountain of unfinished business, a revitalized Democratic leadership, a pleased president and spreading election-year tensions. It was not quite a do-nothing Congress, as Democrats would have us believe, but it came close.

Mostly it was occupied with inconclusive anti-Clinton and pre-election maneuvering.

This partisan stalemate was frustrating to insiders but actually quite OK. No harm was done. When the president vetoed a massive, GOP-promoted $792 billion tax cut, the public didn't care, and the Republicans quietly dropped the subject.

The nation has no pressing business that cannot wait until voters indicate in the 2000 election how -- or even if -- they would like the logjam to be broken.

The Republicans won only a teensy cut of roughly a third of 1 percent, allowing them to claim a symbolic victory but not enough to jeopardize even those federal programs the party once threatened to eliminate entirely.

GOP leaders are trying to make the most of their thin gruel with television commercials that take credit for stopping the Democrats from "stealing" from Social Security to finance "wasteful spending." The Democrats counter with a stroll through a graveyard where failed bills are buried under tombstones marked for prescription drug benefits, patients' rights, minimum wage and gun control, all issues high on the Democratic agenda.

Because domestic issues dominated the session, the mess that foreign policy has become was largely ignored by the public. Senate rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was a major diplomatic blunder, for instance, amply demonstrating that the partisan passion to undo Clinton doesn't stop at the water's edge. The president was furious, but nobody else even blinked. This too can await an airing in the presidential campaign.

Congress finally reached a budget deal acceptable to Clinton because the GOP had no alternative. Congressional Republicans have a losing hand when it comes to budget confrontations. They took the blame for the government shutdown a few years ago and dare not repeat that. And many voters have been skeptical of the GOP since the impeachment debacle: 46 percent told the Pew Research Center recently that they disapprove of the job GOP congressional leaders are doing.

The national mood, as measured by several polls, indicates that most voters are contented these days and no longer receptive to the hard-edged anti-government rhetoric that swept former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and GOP conservatives into control of Congress. This message has not penetrated the thick skulls of the current House Republican leadership, but it has reached the two most important GOP presidential candidates, Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Arizona Sen. John McCain, who are presenting themselves as centrists.

This should auger well for the Democrats, who tend to view government as a friend rather than an enemy. It may be finally helping Vice President Al Gore, whose slide in the polls is at least temporarily slowing. A Newsweek poll has Bush leading Gore by 49 percent to 43 percent, a much closer trial heat than in recent months, and Gore ahead of former Sen. Bill Bradley by nearly 20 percentage points nationally.

But presidential and congressional politics are not identical. Related, yet not twinned. The president is in the business of proposing, the lawmakers, of disposing. And we all know that proposing is easier.

Marianne Means can be reached at the e-mail address meanshearstdc.com.